Beau Is Afraid (2023, Ari Aster) (Patreon)

50/100

One of those exhilarating rollercoaster rides that saw me resist at the outset, like cars needing to be dragged up a huge incline via cables, then suddenly give in to the sheer relentless excess, giddily screaming, arms raised high in the air. Unfortunately, that metaphor describes my reaction to just the first of what proves to be four grueling acts, and the movie quickly lost me again once Beau starts encountering alternative families both real and imagined. But since I've been an Aster skeptic from the start, let me accentuate the positive: Once I clicked with Beau's absurdist psychodynamic, in which whatever ludicrous outcome the title character fears most is not only realized but turns out to be far worse than he'd imagined, the film turned into an amazing sustained high-wire act, alternating between Barton Fink's initial slow-burn creepiness and mother!'s home-stretch freakout. Aster savvily roots truly demented nightmares in utterly mundane dilemmas; for me, the zenith arrives fairly early, when Beau decides he must venture out of his apartment and across the street so that he can safely take his medication—a sequence that's orchestrated, visually and tonally, like someone making his way across No Man's Land to get hold of the antidote to the deadly poison he's just inadvertently swallowed. (Skandie voters, FYC, Best Scene: Always with water.) By that point, I'd long since stopped wondering or worrying about whether any of this was "real," accepting the film as an extension of Beau's perpetually frazzled consciousness. Could Aster possibly maintain that degree of freneticism for three hours? I was eager to see him try.

Instead, he keeps essentially rebooting the movie, and reverts to the form that I called (in my remarkably popular Hereditary review; rarely does such a mixed response get 1,000+ likes) "memorably freaky, but also frustratingly muddled." There are a few specific things I can point to that bugged me, because they strike me as thematically unmotivated shock posturing: I don't know what Grace and Roger's daughter is doing here (apart from eventually indirectly giving Beau a reason to flee into the forest, then later a reason to leave said forest), and the literally climactic "twist" involving Parker Posey's one-who-got-away seemed like a very cheap gag. To be fair, certain key details, like which characters are secretly in the employ of MW, escaped my notice entirely (though that doesn't explain Beau being able to fast-forward to the movie's final scene—an irrational fillip that doesn't add anything apart from generic mystery). Still, even were I presented with a fully coherent rationale for each of those elements (and no doubt that's being worked out somewhere right now), it wouldn't much allay the laborious feeling that settles in after Beau awakens in Grace and Roger's home and becomes their surrogate son. The problem, I think, is that Beau's anxiety gets externalized. He's now beset by craziness that isn't at all inspired by his own neuroses, which becomes retroactively clear when we discover, in the final (or I guess penultimate) scene, who's been pulling the strings all along. Yes, that's something Beau would fear in the abstract, but as constructed (to best keep viewers guessing), it's composed of at least one too many layers; his brain would need to be playing multi-dimensional chess with itself. In any case, the thrill permanently wore off, and I definitely felt every minute of those last two hours. Even the animated interlude, while aesthetically pleasing (watch The Wolf House!), ultimately trails off in shaggy-Beau irrelevance. Freudian attic's memorably nutso but frankly kinda goofy. Show trial played like an afterword I didn't care to read. I dunno. He's just not for me.

(Also sorta not for me—highly unpopular opinion, avert thine eyes—Joaquin Phoenix, whose work I respect but almost always find too strained. After arguing with a friend about this yesterday, I checked to see whether I've ever given him Skandie points; my ballots from 1996–2005 are currently lost/misplaced*, so I don't know about Gladiator, but the sole instance over the past 17 years was a token five points for Two Lovers, the film for which we won our Best Actor award. That's definitely my favorite performance of his. When folks rave about something like You Were Never Really Here, though, or even The Master, I maintain a polite silence. He's fine here, no real complaints, but I'd probably have enjoyed Beau more with a different, less sweaty actor in the title role.)

* SKANDIE VOTERS PAST AND PRESENT: I did very recently find some old ballots that I'd thought were gone—everything from 1998 except my own (which I didn't email to myself), and everything from 1997 except my own and one other. 1999 is probably unreconstructable, but half of the ballots were posted to CMs when folks initially joined and were introducing themselves. Beyond that I haven't yet properly searched. Anyway, if by chance you still have any ballots that predate Mark's online version, meaning 2005 and earlier, please email them to me. thanks buds.